Search This Blog

Sterilising women to death

A doctor conducted
sterilization surgeries on 83 women in 5 hours in an abandoned hospital with no
infrastructure. The women were made to lay on floor for the surgery and there
are allegations that the medicines came from a small, one room factory that is
owned by close affiliates of the party that is ruling the province. Of these
women, 11 are dead and 60 others are being treated in different hospitals. One
more woman died today in Gaurela in a similar surgery with three survivors
being treated. The place is around 100 kilometres away from Bilaspur where
first deaths occurred. Any government should be expected to jump into action to
stop the tragedy from recurring, but the Chhattisgarh Government has not.

The only action
taken by the government is blaming it all on the doctor and arresting him. The
facts, however, show that he might be the least responsible for it. He was
merely doing his duty and has been rewarded by the state government for
conducting 100,000 surgeries on the Republic Day this year. In fact it is the
government that pressures doctors working for it to meet family planning
targets - the euphemism India uses for population control - despite repeated
calls from both the medical fraternity and civil society to abandon the target
centric approach. Family planning policy in India has never taken the views of
the people it affects the most. It has never tried to educate the people and
then take their informed consent. It has always bullied them into accepting
what government thinks is the best for them.

Unfortunately, this
septic practice is not limited to “family planning”. On February 2013, Amar
Agrwal, health minister of Chhattisgarh, admitted in the state assembly that the
government organised health camps in Balod in 2011 left 44 people blind. He had
also admitted that similar camps left 4 people blind in Durg in march 2012, and
14 people blind in Bagbahra in December same year.

The recent sterilization deaths might have
surprised but they are not anomalous. At least 363 persons have died during sterilisation operations and
14,901 surgeries failed to achieve the intended result between 2010-11 and 2013-14,
according to the Government’s own data submitted to the parliament this year. Going
back further, Government data shows that of 1,434 people have died in sterilization
surgeries in India between 2003 and 2012. That is an average of 12 people dying
each month for a decade.. . It is easy to
assume that women are a majority of these deaths as 97.4% of all such surgeries
are conducted on them. Chhattisgarh and
Assam are the states sitting on the top of this dubious list.

Sterilization camps
generally lack of any facilities and often operated in open; most of the women
coming to are from the most marginalised sections of the society. They come to
these camps because of the meagre remuneration that they get. In fact, from the
woman to village health worker to surgeons, everyone involved in these
surgeries get rewarded. Also, though no one knows if there is a “quota” set for
states by the central government, the rewards that the employees of central
government - air force, navy and railway employees for instance - get for
getting sterilized indicate a heavy possibility of that.

Further, the
remuneration is not the only thing that pulls the women into such camps. Often
this gives many of them their first contact with real doctors; most Indian
villages do not have anyone qualified to care for the health of residents. Many
of the women genuinely believe that the sterilization doctors will listen to
their other problems and give advice and treatment. In reality, it is
impossible for the doctors charged with daunting task of conducting surgeries to
do so, the time they have is simply insufficient. For example, the situation in
this case, 83 surgeries in 5 hours, is not an exceptional rate.

This is why seeing
this case in isolation and punishing a few scapegoats will not succeed in closing
the wound. The problem is multilayered with many interested parties on the
wrong side. It begins with India’s family planning policy that tries everything
from begging to bullying hapless people to get sterilized. Offering
remuneration to everyone involved in such surgeries to restrict people with more
than two children from local body elections, shows the extent to which
government will go to achieve its targets. The lack of healthcare
infrastructure in the countryside combined with often corrupt politicians
forcing the department to buy substandard medicines and equipments from people
affiliated to them leaves the program unequipped to handle the medical needs of
their patients. Abandoned vans with a red triangle upside down, the symbol of
family planning, or the abandoned government buildings, as in Bilaspur, forces
most of the camps to be operated in open and significantly increases the risk
of infection and the system becomes a death trap.

However, it is not
merely the state that is responsible for such deaths. The silence of civil
society and media over issues plaguing rural India play a role in allowing the
system to flout the rules and put the lives of the poor at risk. Hardly anyone seems
to care, or even notice the daily atrocities being committed on the
marginalised and the poor of the country unless something that is spectacularly
disgusting happens. It is as if the country has internalised the violence on
the less fortunate and is shaken only when something as tragic as this recent
spike in deaths takes place. Rajdeep Sardesai, a senior Indian journalist,
expressed the sentiment best in his tweet: “outrage on twitter over the AMU
'story', but none over Chhattisgarh! I guess that tells us a bit abt social
media too! Have a good day!”[sic] .

The only way forward
is to break the death trap by challenging the system at all levels: from family
planning policy to its implementation on the ground. It is time to treat all
Indian citizens as equals and not to treat the poor as people who can be
coerced or bought without informed consent. The success of family planning in
Bangladesh, where it is much more voluntary show that engaging the people and
making them stakeholder in things that impact their lives works, the system of
coercion and allurement in India does not.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Dear Nivedita Menon and rest of Kafila Feminists,
Let’s not waste time in niceties and come straight to the point. The point that
having known you, listened to you, looked up to you, this statement has
disappointed me completely. And Yes, I am speaking strictly from a very
individual POV, I am no one’s spokesperson. Now let me elaborate some serious problems , according to
me:
1. So to begin with, sorry, your claim that the Statement was only from individuals,
sounds outlandish to say the least. Why will, and how can, individuals'
statement make a conditional offer of support on behalf of the "Larger
Feminist Community" if the list is withdrawn? Did the statement offered not
state that in its last sentence? I am quoting it here in case you have
forgotten--"We appeal to those who are behind this initiative to withdraw it, and
if they wish to pursue complaints, to follow due process, and to be assured
that they will be supported by the larger feminist community in th…